


Nation of Heat

by eudaimon



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:47:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not exactly epic, but it is an Odyssey of sorts; the story of how Nate and Brad fell in love in a summer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nation of Heat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PJVilar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Our Year Out of Time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/133571) by [PJVilar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/pseuds/PJVilar). 



> For WarbigBang, PJ Vilar wrote [OUR YEAR OUT OF TIME](http://pjvilar.livejournal.com/68177.html) which cast the boys of Bravo 2 as squatter!punks in New York in the 1990s. I didn't know Jen then, but OYOoT had a profound affect on me when I read it and it continues to. If I had to choose one piece of fanfic to read for the rest of my life, this would be it. If I had to choose one incarnation of Nate Fick that I am completely and utterly in love with, it would be this one. Jen gave me permission to play in her world and this is what came of that: the epic love story that is Brad and Nate that is there in **Our Year out of Time** but only in hints and murmurs. This is my attempt to fill in the gaps that Jen so gracefully left. And it's posted with her blessing.

_Outside the train station there's a bold painted sign_  
It says try to be patient don't forget to choose sides  
We got the loudest explosions that you've ever heard  
We've got two dollar soldiers and ten dollar words 

 

**Walk before you can run**

Slowly but surely, they improve. They put down newspaper to kill the nettles and the weeds. Poke spends hours with his mural. Christie reads a paperback in the shade. One afternoon, Brad and Gabe pour concrete.

They make it habitable. But more than that. They make it theirs.

In the corner of the square, where it will eventually be hidden by potted herbs and the makeshift barbeque, Brad crouches down and scrawls his name in the still wet concrete. If pressed, he’d put it down to his age, maybe or circumstance – wanting to leave behind something that will last as long as the house does.

After a moment of consideration, he writes Nate’s name there too.

*

He's not sure when it occurs to him that he has no rights where Nate is concerned. Maybe it's when he wants to touch him but can't; watching Nate chop herbs in the kitchen, his hair slips forward and Brad almost reaches out to brush it back before he realises. He shoves his hand in his pocket instead makes a fist around the Zippo that he still carries even though he hasn't smoked anything in weeks. Nate glances up from what he's doing.

"You know you want to peel potatoes for me," says Nate.  
Brad doesn't know what the fuck he wants but he knows it isn't that.

It all comes into stark relief when Christie comes by. She's not particularly beautiful, not by any standard that Brad's ever had; not her face, anyway, underneath her short, curling hair. Her eyes are pretty lovely, wide and brown that’s almost black, warm when she smiles. Her tattoos are definitely fucking beautiful, spangled across her shoulders and down to her elbows on both sides, splashes of colour and script, faces and leaves. Brad leans back and watches them greet each other, watches Christie lean in and touch Nate's shoulder to get his attention. Smiling suddenly, Nate's fingers find the small of her back and then they kiss, quick, on the mouth.

Brad isn't prepared for the sudden stab of jealousy, so reminiscent of the way he'd felt reading that fucking letter (long shredded but, if he thinks about it, he can still remember every single word). It feels like he has absolutely no right to jealousy like that, anyway, but there it is, hot and near like a spark that he could cup his hands around.

He ends up at Nate’s side.

Sometime that evening, taking the first swallow of shop-bought beer while passing a glass of homebrew off into Nate’s waiting hands, Brad realises three things: that Christie is excellent company, that he’s got nothing to be jealous of where she’s concerned and that he wants to be able to touch Nate any time he likes.

Something to work on, anyway.

*

**Wear your history on your skin. Own it.**

About half the time, Rudy drives him fucking nuts. He’s seventeen so he feels like he’s coming out of his skin and then there’s Rudy, all calm, all centre, meditating to the hum of his tattooing rig. Brad does a lot of cleaning, a lot of setting up trays and fixing coffees. He sits at the scarred draft table and copies designs onto carbon paper in the good light. He’s not an artist and it definitely isn’t art but it feels good to be improving, all the same. It feels good to find his usefulness.

Rudy talks. Brad learns to listen properly.

Rudy doesn’t have a book but, if he did, he says that Nate’s work would be in there. He’s proud of that kind of work and, little by little, Brad finds out the story behind it. He doesn’t need a book to be able to picture Nate’s tattoos. In a summer where Nate wears wifebeaters in the evenings, sitting in a hammock in the yard with Kathy Acker while everyone else is settling down to sleep. 

The point is: he’s realising that he already knows Nate Fick by heart.

He gets to understand the butterflies. There’s a little cluster of them done in violet and blue on Nate’s right forearm, between wrist and elbow.

“They weren’t all done at once,” explains Rudy, head bent over his work. “Every so often, he comes in with somebody he needs to hold in his heart.” He glances up at Brad, hair in his eyes for a moment. “Ink’s good for that, brother. It’s more reliable than memory.”

(One of the butterflies is not the same as the others. Mostly black, wings spotted with electric blue as bright as neon. Brad looks it up at the library: it’s an _Eumaeus atala_ which feels like something that he should have known already. That one American butterfly, he supposes, might be for Pam. They talk about her so often).

It’s the ship, though, that Brad finds most fascinating. It’s picked out in blues and reds in full sail on a choppy sea. The rigging is intricate, the movement in the thing palpable. Surrounded by vines and leaves, flares of brightly coloured flowers, it looks, for all the world, like it’s sailing through thick jungle. Brad finds himself thinking about explorers and new worlds every time he looks at it.

“I was so proud of that one, Brad,” says Rudy, carefully washing his hands before the first client of the day. “I like to think that it’s a metaphor, you know? For life? How the journey isn’t always easy. But you figure it out.”

At the counter, Pappy takes a sip of his coffee and nods.

“An’ you just keep goin’,” he says. “Like Odysseus after Troy.”

A few weeks later, Brad borrows a worn copy of _The Odyssey_ from Nate’s ramshackle bookshelf. He reads it from cover to cover over the span of a week and a half and one thing in particular stays with him: that it can be so hard to find a place, even when you know exactly where it is that you’re supposed to be heading.

So that’s what Nate’s tattoos mean, at their heart:

Make a plan. Watch it go to shit. Adapt. And make do.

*

**Try not to lose your head**

They jerk each other off; they never kiss. Nate finds himself fantasising about kissing in a way that he hasn’t since he was a kid. He’s not shy about the fact that he’s never had to work too hard to have someone in his bed. He supposes that it must have something to do with being comfortable in his own skin. Christie teases him about it, sometimes. _Jesus Nate,_ she says. _I used to have some self-control but then you looked at me with that revolutionary fucking zeal shining in your eyes and suddenly I didn’t know what happened to my underwear._ She grins. _True story._

They haven’t slept together in a while. He hasn’t gone down on her in a long time. He still loves her.

And he’s obsessed with the thought of kissing. He shouldn’t even be looking but he is, watching the way that Brad’s hair is growing out and the way he’s growing into himself more surely, one heartbeat at a time.

If Nate thinks about it too hard, he feels like a shit-heel for wanting Brad as hard as he does.

Sometimes, he thinks he was born with restlessness in his bones. He gets the urge to move on, from time to time, thinks that he could throw a few things in a bag and head to Penn and just take the first train that would take him to somewhere else. Anywhere else.

But then he starts to think of Brad as an anchor.

Around them, the park hums with noise but, in that moment between them, everything’s still. The heat is heavy. He can feel Brad’s breath against his lips. He’s past the point of thinking that wanting to be with Brad is a bad idea. He’ll figure it out as he goes along. They’ll figure it out together.

Later, he’ll never be sure who moves first. One of them makes the first move but Nate shifts closer on his side and leans in and Brad sways to meet him. It’s not a historic kind of kiss, not myth-making in any way, but it’s good, solid, square on the mouth and Nate feels it in his belly and his balls. He grazes one hand over Brad’s hair. They stay neat and close, like teenagers afraid to touch in case they’re interrupted and interruption is all around them but, right then, the universe contains just the two of them.

Brad says that he likes to know where he is. And Nate can understand that.  
But what Nate likes is knowing what comes next.

*  
 **…But lose it anyway, from time to time**

He listens to the sounds that Brad makes in the tub, imagines him shifting and water overspilling the edge of the tub, splashing down onto the tiles. He imagines Brad naked with one leg draped and he arches his back, fucking himself smoothly with slick fingers. He’s practised and good at this, enjoys it, enjoys getting fucked. But not as much as he enjoys imagining the look on Brad’s face when he finds him ready and waiting.

He pulls his fingers out of himself slowly, strokes his dick once, twice for good measure. There’s a copy of Adbusters discarded on the floor beside his bed. He picks it up and idly leafs through articles that he’s read already. 

*

He knows that Brad’s behind him; he can feel it without even looking. He shifts his hips against the bed, once, feels the brief, breathless friction of the cotton against his dick and then he pushes the magazine onto the floor and he rolls onto his back.

_Come here_. He thinks it but doesn’t actually say it out loud. Brad walks towards him and Nate pushes up onto his knees. He kisses Brad hard and hungry, presses the throb of his dick against the heat of Brad’s hip. How long since he was totally naked with another human being? Fully, gloriously fucking naked? He presses against Brad any way that he can.

There’s a condom under the pillow. The building is humid and quiet, around and below them. Nate so rarely feels like he’s got time these days but, now, right now, just here, he does and anything is possible.

“Come here.”

He actually says it this time, pulling Brad down to him on the bed, room between his spread thighs. “Come on.”

*

Too many people try too hard to turn sex into something it isn’t. Later in life, maybe, he’ll think differently but right now sex is something free and joyous, something to be shared and revelled in. Naked, half naked, in willing arms, Nate’s always found himself changing and seeming to grow through the experience.

“Tell me how it feels,” says Brad, raw whisper close to Nate’s ear. Nate reminds himself that this is Brad’s first time at this and cradles his face with both hands, feels the flush in Brad’s cheeks against his palms. The truth is that there is no way to accurately put this into words that won’t feel clichéd and stupid, which is not how this should be, so Nate doesn’t even try. He shifts under Brad in the bed, lifts and then rocks down onto his dick, crushes their mouths together and sucks on Brad’s tongue because he needs Brad to know that he will take Brad inside him any way that he can.

Once, Nate fucked a PhD student from NYU who told him his theory that sex was a sort of Pidgin tongue; cobbled together, different for everyone and any time you fucked you were just trying desperately to make yourself understood.

But fuck that. Nate finds Brad’s mouth again and knows the truth of it.  
Sex isn’t a language. It’s a ladder.

*

It’s too hot in the room to lie so close together but they do it anyway, sheets kicked off into a sweat-soaked tangle, skin on skin.

“When was the last time you got fucked like that?” asks Brad and it’s such a kid question, so _young_ , that Nate can’t help but laugh. He stretches like a cat, feels a satisfying pop in his spine and sags back.

“Christie, actually,” he says, and watches Brad’s eyes widen slightly.   
“Really?”  
“Yup.” Nate kisses Brad. His nails scrape against the sparse hair on Brad’s chest. “With a strap on. It was pretty fucking awesome.”

Brad’s quiet and Nate can tell that he’s picturing it. He grins and lies there, feeling changed, feeling bold and resilient and free.

Brad kisses him hard and sudden.  
Nate loses all of his breath.

*  
 **Be the trouble that you want to see in the world**

Mike comes back without them and Brad just knows. Call it instinct or intuition or the failure of hope to triumph over expectation.

He’s in the common kitchen, wiping down surfaces for lack of anything better to do while Ray draws on an old pair of boots with White-Out. Mike leans against the counter and doesn’t say a word.

Mother _fucker_.

“How bad is it?”

More silence.

“Not as bad as it could be,” says Mike. “Bad enough.”

Brad’s all for going down there but Mike stops him with a hand on his shoulder. Brad knows that he could shrug Mike off but then Mike squeezes his shoulder and Brad stays.

“I…”  
“I know,” says Mike. “but you’ll do him more good here.”  
Which is not quite the same as _more harm there_.

In Nate’s (their) apartment, Brad stands for a moment and, out in the street, he can hear the normal sounds of the city, alarms and horns and just the humming jazz chatter heartbeat of the neighbourhood but, for a moment, he imagines that he can hear shouting and drums.

A fist slammed into plaster makes a dent. His knuckles bleed. He sits down in the corner and dozes there rather than sleep in a bed where Nate is not.

*

By the third day, he knows every inch of the cell by heart. Names carved into the walls. The dripping of a pipe somewhere overhead. The faint almost unperceivable odour of half-eaten meals and piss and his own body.

The contents of his pockets when arrested:

> \- $25  
> \- 63 cents  
> \- 2 sticks of Wrigleys  
> \- 1 ball point pen  
> \- 1 book of matches  
> \- 1 bunch of keys  
> \- Absolutely no I.D

And they know who he is. They all know who he is. But they keep asking and he just keeps giving them the same blank look.

So they don’t let Mike in.

As far as he can, he tries not to think about Brad. Which is about as easy as it’s always been. Mostly, he thinks about the way the conversation will go when he finally gets home. Mostly, he’s really fucking glad that Brad wasn’t there in the park. It’s amazing how quickly he’s gotten out of the habit of sleeping alone. Without being tangled with someone else, his limbs feel lonely and strange. He closes his eyes and lies still the way Rudy taught him. He mediates on being a stone.

For three days, he doesn’t get a lot of sleep

*

He hears when Nate comes home but he doesn’t get up and go to him. He’s spent the last three days fighting this dreadful fucking numbness in his chest, not sure how he’s supposed to feel until he absolutely _does_ know how he feels, sometime around lying there watching the new ceiling fan whir overhead.

Which was a bitch to install, by the way.  
But he had to keep his hands busy somewhere.

At first, he can’t even look at Nate, he’s so angry; angry with him for being gone, angry with him for making it look so easy to come back.

(He spends his life terrified that, one day, he’ll have to leave and he’ll never find his way back in).

In the bathtub with Nate, he yields, feeling buoyant and very young and Nate knows what he’s doing enough for both of them and Brad concentrates on just breathing past the emotion that’s pounding like a second pulse in his chest.

_Don’t. Don’t. Don’t._

And Nate says he won’t which they both know is a lie but Brad doesn’t really need to know that he won’t do it again. He just needs Nate to know that it’s tough on both of them. He just needs Nate to know that he don’t like it.

He comes so hard that it leaves him scooped out and scrubbed clean. The tub isn’t really big enough for both of them but they fumble and they figure it out and he rests his cheek against Nate’s bare chest and strokes his thumb against Nate’s ribs. Somehow _I love you_ and _go home_ get tangled.

Which is fine. It’s making a future. It’s making a plan and changing it. And making do.

*

**Things that he didn’t tell Nate at the time** :

> \- His birthday is the second to last day of September. He passes it with Ray and, in the evening, he takes his time sucking Nate’s cock.  
> \- Eighteen doesn’t feel any different from seventeen. Not really. Except for when it does.  
> \- One day in the park he watches Marines go walking by. It’s difficult to parse the way that it makes him feel.  
> \- For a long, long time afterwards, he dreams of running as the cops break in downstairs. In those dreams, he’s standing on a rooftop in one of Nate’s t-shirts and all that he can hear is shouting and change and, powerless, he starts to wonder if he has wings.  
> \- Sometimes, in those dreams, he jumps.  
> \- He always intends to come back.

*

**Even if victory isn’t written in our stars**

Later, they frame Lilley’s photos and hang them. Brad spends hours staring at them, trying to remember exactly when they were taken. That one of Nate, Brad’s just out of shot and moments later, he leaned in and tugged Nate’s t-shirt true. He remembers laughing himself sick at Ray’s shit with the matches and he remembers the shouted conversations that used to make Walt brighten like that.

But it’s so difficult to remember the individual details of the mess of experience that made up that one spectacular, ridiculous year when he was seventeen years old.

And he might not recall exactly, but it seems important to at least feel like he remembers.

*

This time, coming back, he brings shit with him: books and family photos and random stuff like that stuffed into one cardboard box. He doesn’t fight so hard to leave his whole life behind.

He walks into Bravo 2 mid-afternoon on a Thursday, and everything is quiet and still. There are boots in the hall that he doesn’t recognise. Everything feels the same while also seeming irrevocably changed. And he is changed too.

He finds Nate in the kitchen, humming to himself while he paints the skirting boards a bright, sunny shade of blue. Carefully Brad sets down his duffle bag and his box and then he’s dropping down onto his knees and pressing a careful kiss to the nape of Nate’s neck. 

Nate holds, for a moment, but then he leans back with a sigh.

“You took your fucking time,” he says.  
And everything’s not so different that it can’t slide back into place.

*

He leans over Brad lying prone on the bed and he writes his name in Sharpie on smooth than skin.

**N A T E.**

Two days later, Brad comes home with that name written forever in ink and blood. It’s not Rudy’s work, but it’s good, neat and clean, the lines strong and unmistakably Nate’s handwriting.

And it feels less like an end than a beginning.


End file.
